True Worship

"Away with your hymns of praise! They are only noise to my ears. I will not listen to your music, no matter how lovely it is. Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice, a river of righteous living that will never run dry." (Amos 5:23-24) God does not want our music. He does not want our slow songs with our hands raised and our tears. When we think of Praise and Worship, we think of going to church and singing. That is not what worship is. Worship is a lifestyle. When Abraham said in Genesis 22:5 "Stay here with the donkey; the lad and I will go yonder and worship," he was not talking about singing a slow song. The word worship means obedience. He was going to sacrifice his one and only son, the son promised by God, but now that God was asking Abraham to sacrifice him, he would obey. That is what he meant when he said worship - he wasn't lying to anyone. So to define worship, worhip is a life of obedience. Another part of worship is the fact that our hearts have to be in it. We have to want to obey, we can't just simply obey because we're supposed to and then expect great things from God. This is what is called being submissive. The difference between obedient and submissive is that obedience can be forced. Submissiveness is the desire to obey. If it isn't coming from the heart, it's useless. Words are nice, but without action, or with a contradictory action, they are meaningless. Action is nice, but if your heart isn't in it... if you're just obeying because it's the right thing to do, even if you don't want to... it's meaningless to God. He already knows your heart, and it's the heart that matters. If you go read psalms, there are tons of verses about the heart: The righteousness of the heart, the secrets of the heart, the obedience of the heart. There is scripture that says "Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks." What God wants from us is a mighty flood of justice, a river of righteous living that will never run dry. Righteous living - living right. And living right because we want to, not because we're supposed to.